Re: [PATCH/RFC] Change t0204-gettext-reencode-sanity.sh to pass under Mac OSX

[Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>]

Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason <avarab@gmail.com> writes:

> On Wed, Mar 7, 2012 at 22:34, Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> wrote:
>>> I think it's important to be pro-active about trying to spot
>>> any issues that might affect end users before they happen.
>>
>> The goal is noble, but asking the platform to perform an impossible
>> task and subjectively judging if the failure mode is acceptable is
>> not the way to do so, I would have to say.
>
> I leave it up to you whether you want to accept the patch to remove
> it, but with it included we at least *know* what the failure modes
> are, since we get user reports about it.
>
> That's the reason I put it in there to begin with. Because I have no
> idea how all these pieces play together with systems in the wild, and
> I'd like to pro-actively find out about that.

Are we talking about the same specific test?

What you said above all makes sense and I agreed that it is a noble
goal, *if* and only if the test is about the case we *expect* to
work.  This particular one prepares a message that cannot possibly
be transliterated to iso-8859-1 and asks the system to show it.

What scenario do you have in mind that we (or the end user for that
matter) might benefit by having this test?  What would be the next
step for us, when this test finds yet another mode of breakage that
spews out a different kind of garbage other than runs of "?", the
key used to query the message catalog ("TEST: Old English Runes"),
or the raw value stored in the message catalog (runes in UTF-8)?